UC Berkeley addresses housing shortage
A $300 million donation to the University of California, Berkeley, will ease a campus housing crunch and pay for construction of a 14-story residence hall for 772 students.
The university says the residence hall, called Anchor House, will be a significant step in addressing the student housing crisis at Berkeley, where about 40% of undergraduates are not able to live on or near campus. The Helen Diller Family Foundation has donated the money to build the facility, which will be one block from the campus.
The plans call for 244 apartments—47 studio apartments, 30 two-bedroom apartments, 3 three-bedroom apartments, and 164 four-bedroom apartments. The university expects that most of students living at Anchor House will be Californians who have transferred to UC Berkeley from community colleges and other schools. In 2020-21, the university says, 4,779 students transferred to UC Berkeley, most coming from California community colleges.
Anchor House also will have plenty of spaces for social interaction and well-being: a central landscaped courtyard, multiple terraces, lounges and meeting rooms, and a pantry off the courtyard where groups can prepare and share meals.
In addition to providing living space for students, Anchor House will have about 15,000 square feet of retail and space on the ground floor. Operating revenue from the Anchor House will help underwrite annual scholarships for students living there. UC Berkeley projects that about 100 two-year scholarships could be generated each year.
The building, two blocks from downtown Berkeley’s rapid transit station, also will provide a home base for commuting students. They will be able to store their belongings there and spend down time in the campus’ first dedicated commuter lounge.
The facility will have solar panels on its roof that are projected to provide up to 30% of the residence hall’s cooling needs. The roof also will have a vegetable garden where students can learn about organic farming and farm-to-table concepts. The hall also will have an 8,600-square-foot indoor-outdoor fitness center yoga and meditation rooms; a bicycle storage and repair facility and a maker space that will offer art classes for students and the community.
Construction is expected to begin later in 2021 and be completed in time for the fall 2024 semester.
The design team consists of Morris Adjmi Architects, Brand/Bureau, AvroKO and Andrea Cochran Landscape Architects.
$37 million residence hall will house first-year-students at Creighton University
Creighton University has begun construction of a $37 million residence hall for its first-year students on its Omaha, Neb., campus.
The facility will house 400 students when it opens for the fall 2023 semester.
It will be the first Creighton residence hall built exclusively for first-year students since the 1960s, and the first new residence hall of any kind since 2006. The opening of the new hall will enable the university to offer significantly more first-year rooms in the suite-style concept, which permits more independent living and has become the preferred option for students around the nation.
Accommodations will consist of two adjoining rooms, two double-occupancy bedrooms, a shared bathroom and a central community kitchen. Each floor will have kitchenettes, as well as dedicated spaces for student development programs.
Tanya Winegard, vice provost for student life, said the creation of an interfaith prayer space and installation of two prayer rooms reserved for Muslim students will reflect Creighton’s institutional commitment to diversity and inclusion. They will replace the existing Muslim prayer rooms in Kiewit Hall.
Spaces for wellness and academic support programs will be integral to the new hall, while socialization will be encouraged by construction of an elevated outdoor courtyard where gatherings and events may be held.
The residence hall will be located a few blocks east of the future site of the recently announced CL Werner Center for Health Sciences Education, which will serve as the new home of the School of Medicine and as a hub for all Creighton health sciences schools and colleges.
Brown University residence hall focuses on health and wellness
Brown University has opened its first new residence hall on the Providence, R.I., campus in 30 years.
The university says the facility is a health and wellness center as well as a residence hall and houses 162 students who share a commitment to healthful lifestyles. The building brings together services and programs instrumental to students’ physical and emotional well-being — including Health Services, Counseling and Psychological Services, Brown Emergency Medical Services and BWell, the university’s health promotion program.
Construction was completed in Spring 2021, and during the summer, four of the health and wellness services and programs moved in. Students began to arrive in September.
“The new health and wellness center and residence hall presents Brown with an extraordinary opportunity to be innovative in how we support health and well-being,” said Dr. Vanessa Britto, executive director of health and wellness. “By bringing together many of the services and programs that focus on health and wellness, the center will create a campus-wide environment that guides all students as they learn how best to care for themselves physically and emotionally.”
Each of the building’s undergraduate residents applied to be members of the community, and selections were made by a committee of staff and students. During the application process, students described their well-being practices — from meditation to walking, journaling to cooking shared meals — and described the ways that bringing these practices to a committed health and wellness community appealed to them.
In addition to residence hall leaders, undergraduates living in the new building will have access to five wellness peer education coordinators, who will help residents bring their varied wellness practices to their living community.
Net-zero housing at Long Beach State
A newly constructed $100 million residence hall at California State University Long Beach is the first net-zero energy student housing in the Cal State system.
The Long Beach Press-Telegram reports that the Parkside North Residence Hall also is the first new student housing on the Long Beach State campus in three decades.
The four-story glass and wood building, featuring a blue and yellow wave-like metal façade on two outside walls, adds 472 beds to the university’s housing complex.
The additional beds will increase the on-campus student resident population to nearly 3,200, the university says.
The building will create as much renewable energy as it uses and features reclaimed water and a solar rooftop terrace. On-site renewable energy also is provided by existing solar canopies in campus parking lots.
Parkside North also will offer pod study rooms, kitchens, multiple levels of community space and outdoor courtyard space. It is situated around two courtyards that offer students outdoor social as well as study areas. Laundry facilities and a large multipurpose room are on the first floor.
The architect is Gensler.
University of Southern Maine will add student housing to Portland campus
The University of Southern Maine is building the first residence hall on its Portland campus
The university says the 218,000-square-foot, $72.8 million Portland Commons will provide living space for 580 students in a sustainably designed, energy-efficient facility.
It will be built to passive house standards. That means it will be energy-efficient, partly solar-powered, and will produce only half the carbon of a regular residence hall. It will feature sustainable landscaping, recycling, and waste minimization.
The completed residence hall will highlight sustainable strategies within the building to educate students about all aspects of sustainability: environmental stewardship, social justice, and economic equity.
The hall will feature large glass panels in the first-floor common areas that will help make the campus more welcoming and engaging. The first floor will have a variety of study and meeting rooms, a common gathering space, and room for indoor bike storage
The four wings of the development — two reaching five stories in height and two reaching eight stories in height — will form a parallelogram that encloses a half-acre semiprivate residential courtyard on the first floor.
The university plans for Portland Commons to be home to undergraduate students in their second, third, or fourth year, as well as graduate and law school students. First-year undergraduate students will continue to have residency options on Southern Maine's campus in Gorham, about 10 miles to the west.
The project team consists of Elkus Manfredi Architects, SMRT, PC Construction and Capstone Development Partners.
The university expects construction to be completed by June 2023.
University of Georgia is adding housing for first-year students
The University of Georgia has begun construction on its Athens campus of a residence hall for first-year students.
The university says the 525-bed facility, referred to on its website as “Building 2264,” is being erected on the site of the former Bolton Dining Hall. The site has been a gravel parking lot since the dining hall was razed several years ago.
The Office of University Architects for Facilities Planning says the 120,500-square-foot project has a budget of $50 million and construction is set to be completed in July 2022.
Residents will be able to control their in-room temperature and have access to privacy-enhanced community bathrooms, as well as extensive shared lounge and study areas to support academic success and personal growth, the university says.
In addition, the new residence hall means Georgia can offer more ADA-compliant spaces than ever before, as well as much-needed green space in the heart of the university’s first-year communities.
The architectural team for the project is Beck/RAMSA, and the contractor is Turner Construction.
Federally backed loan helps Bethune-Cookman University end disastrous housing deal
Bethune-Cookman University and the developer of a residence hall built in 2016 have settled a long-standing dispute that had threatened to put the 117-year-old Daytona Beach, Fla., school out of existence.
The Daytona Beach News Journal reports that to resolve the situation, university officials signed an agreement to acquire $108 million in financing backed by the U.S. Department of Education and Rice Capital. The money is part of a federal loan program for historically Black colleges and universities.
Bethune-Cookman built the Thomas and Joyce Hanks Moorehead Residential Life Center five years ago at a cost of $84 million, some $12 million more than officials had announced. In addition, the terms of the financing would have caused the loan repayment costs to balloon to $306 million.
“Ending this deal marks the dawn of a new beginning for B-C, giving the entire university community and its stakeholders confidence in the future, which now burns very bright," Belvin Perry Jr., chairman of the university's board of trustees, said in a news release.
The federally backed loan will pay off the residence hall note and be used for deferred maintenance of other university property. The loan is for 30 years.
Past leaders of Bethune-Cookman were responsible for the residence hall deal; after the university's current leadership became aware of the financially catastrophic terms of the arrangement, the university became mired in lawsuits.
